Your latest post strikes close to home for me. Thanks. I have used paper, sheet and tabs on the guitar and fiddle for years and need to get the by ear thing in place. Am working on it but it comes very slow. It would be nice to pick up my instrument of choice and play any favorite song and sing along without paper. My surfing on fiddle, violin, mandolin and guitar web sites get into the by ear vs sheet and tabs from time to time. I have a pretty long file of the thoughts and conclusions and what works for them thing. Some pretty deep stuff at times and disagreements, some of which I have included below. Hope it is not a big waste of time overkill for you.

In any event the general consensus seem to be that you just have to lay the paper down and pay your dues on the by ear. How they did it and results get a pretty good working over on the various site forum threads. If you did a search on most of these music sites or a general Google search on learning by ear or some such you should get several hits

It seems to come down to the probability that the brain is in general somewhat split left and right side and works some different on each side. The sheet or dot reading, tabs and fingering and muscle memory seem to be on one side and the by ear stuff on the other though there is obviously some interaction. To do the ear stuff you have to have a reasonable grasp of the instrument fingering and chord fingering and picking and strumming and be able to tell you hands what to do, hopefully pretty much up to speed. It needs to be ingrained enough that you can work on playing a tune without having to tell your hands and fingers what to do. It needs to get on automatic to where you just play what you hear.

You just have to take the time every day to lay the paper down for a while and work on the tunes in your head and play along with your you tube favorites or cds or dvds or whatever. A slowdown capability such as on Windows Media Player may help. I have a cheapie casette player and a sony digital recorder, the walmart $40 one that I record my favorite or “to learn” tunes on. fiddlehangout and fiddlefork have music sections with lots of tunes to listen to if any of them fit your desired repertoire. You do have to sign up to access them but it is free. It seems like playing with others gives the fastest results though. Jam time….. I don’t have much opportunity here in central Oregon. Oh to be near a lot of venues.

Have a nice day and enjoy and thanks again for your great site.

Hope to get to see you again ( and have a lesson ) at next summer’s Windy City Uke Fest.